by Bao Ninh
For the entire night I floated in the sea of suffering called Mau Than, the tragic year of 1968. When I awoke it was almost dawn yet the dream images were then transferred to my waking hours: Hoa fallen in a grassy plot in the jungle, the American troops rushing towards her, then surrounding her, like bare-chested apes, puffing and panting, grabbing her, breathing heavily over her body. My throat still hurt from screaming during the nightmare, my lips were bleeding, the buttons of my pyjama coat had been ripped off, my chest was deeply scratched and my heart beat painfully, as though I were in danger, not our courageous Hoa.
Since returning to Hanoi I’ve had to live with this parade of horrific memories, day after day, long night after long night. For how many years now?
For how many more years?
Often in the middle of a busy street, in broad daylight, I’ve suddenly become lost in a daydream. On smelling the stink of rotten meat I’ve suddenly imagined I was back crossing Hamburger Hill in 1972, walking over strewn corpses. The stench of death is often so overpowering I have to stop in the middle of the pavement, holding my nose, while startled, suspicious people step around me, avoiding my mad stare.
In my bedroom, on many nights the helicopters attack overhead. The dreaded whump-whump-whump of their rotor blades bringing horror for us in the field. I curl up in defence against the expected vapour-streak and the howling of their rockets.
But the whump-whump-whump continues without the attack, and the helicopter images dissolve, and I see in its place a ceiling fan. Whump-whump-whump.
I am watching a US war movie with scenes of American soldiers yelling as they launch themselves into combat on the TV screen and once again I’m ready to jump in and mix it in the fiery scene of blood, mad killing and brutality that warps soul and personality. The thirst for killing, the cruelty, the animal psychology, the evil desperation. I sit dizzied, shocked by the barbarous excitement of reliving close combat with bayonets and rifle-butts. My heart beats rapidly as I stare at the dark corners of the room where ghost soldiers emerge, shredded with gaping wounds.
My life seems little different from that of a sampan pushed upstream towards the past. The future lied to us, there long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful pre-war past.
The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall.
Still, even in the midst of my reminiscences I can’t avoid admitting there seems little left for me to hope for. From my life before soldiering there remains sadly little. That wonderful period has been heartlessly extinguished. The lucky star of fortune I once had seems also to be gone forever. It once shone brightly, but quickly burnt out. The aura of hope in those early post-war days swiftly faded.
Those who survived continue to live. But that will has gone, that burning will which was once Vietnam’s salvation. Where is the reward of enlightenment due to us for attaining our sacred war goals? Our history-making efforts for the great generations have been to no avail. What’s so different here and now from the vulgar and cruel life we all experienced during the war?
Even me, I’m nearly forty. I was eighteen at the start of the war in 1965, twenty-eight at the fall of Saigon in 1975. So, how many long years have passed? Ten or eleven? Twelve. No. Thirteen? Another year with the MIA team. Or was it longer? And more time wandering as a Veteran. Closer to fourteen years lost because of the war.
And me already forty. An age I once thought distant, strange, somehow unattainable.
From the horizon of the distant past an immense sad wind, like an endless sorrow, gusts and blows through the cities, through the villages, and through my life.
Kien lays his pen down. He turns off the table lamp, pushes his chair away, stands up and silently walks to the window. It is very cold in the room, yet he feels hot and breathless. He is uneasy, as though he feels a violent summer thunderstorm approaching, heralded by gusts of alternately hot and cold air.
So bitter is his frustration that he feels his pen takes him closer at first and then more distant from what he wishes to say.
Every evening, before sitting at his desk and opening his manuscript, he tries to generate the appropriate atmosphere, the right feelings. He tries to separate each problem, the problem of paragraphs and pages, wishing to finish them in a specific way and by a specific time. He plans the sequences in his mind. What his heroes will do and what they will say in particular circumstances. How they’ll meet, how they’ll part. He lays the design of this out in his mind before taking up his pen.
But the act of writing blurs his neat designs, finally washing them away altogether, or blurs them so the lines become inter-mixed and sequences lose their order.
Upon rereading the manuscript he is astounded, then terrified, to read that his hero from a previous page has, on this page, disintegrated. Worse, that his heroes are inconsistent and contradictory, and make him uneasy. The more uneasy he feels the quicker the task at hand slides from his mind.
On some nights, he energetically follows a certain line, pursuing it sentence by sentence, page by page, building it into a substantial work. He wrestles with it, becomes consumed by it, then in a flash sees it is all irrelevant. Standing back from it he then sees no value in the frantic work, for the story-line stands beyond that circled arena of his soul, that little secret area which we all know intuitively contains our spiritual reserves.
Kien seems to write only to rid himself of his devils. Neither the torment of regret brought on by wasted writing efforts, nor the loss of his health, can overcome his urgent desire to be a perfectionist. The threat of being pinned to his writing-desk for great lengths of time similarly does not concern him. He continues his quest for perfection, crossing out, erasing, crossing out again, editing, tearing up some pages, then tearing up and destroying all. Then he starts over again, making out each syllable like a learner trying to spell a new word.
Even so, he still believes in his writing and his talent. It is something else that needs to be addressed, something intangible, other than the writing. So, he begins again, writing and waiting, writing and waiting, sometimes nervous, over-excited.
He seems to mature as he works, and grows more confident from this belief, and pushes on with new confidence, despite all the past failures, patiently savouring the end result he anticipates from his artistic endeavour and creativity.
Despite this growing confidence, he frequently relapses and once again feels like a man standing on the edge of an abyss.
Despite his conviction, his dedication, he also sometimes suspects his recall of certain events. Is there a force at work within him that creates this suspicion?
He dares not abandon himself to emotions, yet in each chapter Kien writes of the war in a deeply personal way, as though it had been his very own war. And so on and on, frantically writing, Kien refights all his battles, relives the times where his life was bitter, lonely, surreal, and full of obstacles and horrendous mistakes. There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images.
It is a dangerous spin he is in, flying off at a tangent, away from the traditional descriptive writing styles, where everything is orderly. Kien’s heroes are not the usual predictable, stiff figures but real people whose lives take diverse and unexpected directions.
After all his trial essays, short stories and novellas comes this novel, which he suddenly realises is his last adventure as a soldier. Curious, for it is at the same time his most serious challenge in life; in writing this work he has driven himself to the brink of insanity. There is no escape, no saviour to help him. He alone must meet this writing challenge, his last duty as a soldier.
/> In contemplation an odd idea takes root in his mind – or has it been there for many years? At the bottom of his heart he believes he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble, but secret. He begins to believe that it is because of this heavenly duty that he had such a brief childhood and adolescence, then matured in time of war. The duty imposed on him in his first forty years a succession of suffering with very few joys. Those who selected Kien to perform these sacred tasks also ordained that he should survive the war, even in battles where it seemed impossible to escape death. The heavenly glow which streaked, sparkled and vanished like a falling star had bathed him in serene light for just a few moments, then disappeared so suddenly that he had no time to understand its full import.
The first time he had felt this secret force was not on the battlefield, but in peacetime, on his post-war MIA missions gathering the remains of the dead. The sacred force nurtured him, protected him and willed him on, renewing his thirst for living and for love. He had never before acknowledged this sacred heavenly duty, yet he had always known it existed within him as an integral part of him, melded with his soul.
From the time of that realisation he felt that day by day his soul was gradually maturing, preparing for its task of fulfilling the sacred heavenly duty of which the novel would become the earthly manifestation.
It was in summer five years ago that, totally by chance, on a lovely warm day he had stopped by the Nha Nam township. And from there he went on to revisit Doi Mo, a tiny, ancient hamlet where twenty years earlier his newly formed battalion had been based and had trained for three months while awaiting transportation to the front, called the ‘Long B’.
The landscape looked to Kien as though it had been forgotten by time. The pine plantations, the myrtles, grassy slopes, and eucalypts in desolate and gloomy lines between fields were exactly as he remembered them as a young recruit. The houses were scattered about as he had remembered them, one on each small hilltop and each as dull and unimaginative as before.
With no particular plan in mind, Kien left the only road through the hamlet and turned down a dirt track almost overgrown by grass.
He knew the track led to Mother Lanh’s house. She had been godmother to the many young recruits, especially his own three-man special team.
The house was still there, looking exactly as he had seen it the day he left; earthen wall, thatched roof, kitchen at the rear facing onto an overgrown small garden. Near a flight of steps, almost obscured by wildflowers and shrubs, was the same old well, with its windlass. Godmother Lanh had died. So now it would be Lan, her youngest daughter, who lived here.
When Lan opened the door and stepped outside she recognised Kien immediately. She even remembered his platoon nickname, the Spirit of Sorrow. Kien had forgotten everything about her.
‘In those days I was just thirteen years old. I still called you uncle. And we girls of the backwoods have always been shy and unattractive,’ she added in self-deprecation. But what Kien saw before him now twenty years later was an intelligent woman, quietly attractive, with mistily sad eyes.
Tears welled up in those sad eyes when Kien told her that the other two in the three-man squad who had stayed with Lan’s mother had been killed on the battlefield. ‘What a cruel time,’ she said, ‘and so very long. The war swept away so many people. So many new recruits used to be based in my house. They used to call my mother their mother, and called me younger sister. But of all of them only you have returned. My two brothers, my classmates and my husband, too, were all younger than you, and joined up years later than you. But none of them has returned. From so many, there is only you left, Kien. Just you.’
She went with him to pay tribute to her mother. Kien burned incense sticks and bent his head in prayer for some time, letting the painful memory of those days throb through his temples while he tried in vain to conjure up the image of the godmother’s face. The last rays of the sun were slanting over the long grasses, now tinged pink in the sunset.
She began speaking quietly: ‘If people had been patient in those days and let parents know of their son’s deaths one at a time, my mother would still be alive today. But in the first weeks of peace the bureaucrats wanted to speed up the delivery of bad news, to get it out of the way quickly. My mother was here one fateful morning when an official arrived bringing a death certificate for my brother, her first son. She took the news badly, although she had feared and expected it. She was buoyed only by the expectation of her second son coming home soon. But a few hours later another courier arrived with a second death certificate telling her my other brother, her second son, had also been killed. Mother collapsed in a faint, then lapsed into a coma. She hung on for three days without uttering another word, then died.’
Kien stared down at Lanh’s tombstone, noticing for the first time a second, much smaller grave alongside it. She said quietly: ‘My son. He was almost eight pounds when he was born, but he only lived two days. His name was Viet. My husband was one of the Tay tribe, far from his province of Ha Giang. He had been based here for less than one month, so there was not even time to complete the formal wedding ceremony. Six months after he left I got a letter, but not from him. It was from one of his mates, writing to tell me he’d been killed on the way into Laos. I’m sure that’s why our baby faded fast and died. It had no will to live.’
They rose and slowly walked down to the house.
‘So, that’s the short story of my life. First my brothers, then my mother, then my husband, then my son. No wonder I feel a little weaker every year. I live in this shell of loneliness, going from house to hill, hill to house, and around the hamlet, with no one paying any attention to me and me not noticing others.
‘By a strange quirk of fate, my husband’s was the last unit based here. After his group left no others came to Doi Mo. Now, after many years of peace you are the only one to return here. Just you. None of the others.’
She asked him to stay the night and he silently agreed. The short summer night softly enfolded them and all that was heard was the sound of a nightbird calling from the edge of the forest and the distant rippling of the hamlet’s slow stream.
Kien and Lan walked out together early in the morning; she stayed with him beyond the first hill, neither of them saying a word. The sun was warming them and the dew evaporated, rising around them. Lan’s face seemed pale and drawn.
‘A few years ago I decided to leave here,’ she said suddenly. ‘I intended to go south and rebuild my life. But I changed my mind. I just couldn’t leave my mother and my son lying over there. I just wait and wait, without knowing what I’m waiting for. Or for whom. Perhaps I’ve been waiting for you.’
Kien remained silent, avoiding her gaze.
‘I knew who you were straight away, although you look very different now. Back then I was so small. But I knew. Perhaps you were my first love and it took all this time for me to realise it.’
Kien tried to smile but his heart felt constricted. He gently raised Lan’s hand to his lips, bent his head, and kissed it a long time.
‘Stay. Live peacefully, my sweet. Try not to be sad, and try not to think poorly of me.’
Lan leaned forward, caressing his shoulders and his greying hair.
‘Forget me. Your life is an open road, go out and enjoy it. I’ll find a foster-child and we’ll live together peacefully. I wish I could have had your child, Kien, but it’s impossible. That doesn’t depress me. Just for a moment let’s imagine that we’ve both come back from the past, while our loved ones were still alive.
‘I ask you to remember one small favour for me. If you come to the end of your wandering and seem to have nowhere left to go and no one to turn to, remember you have a place here with me, always. A home, a woman, a friend. Doi Mo hamlet was where you started this war. You can make it your point of return, if you want to.’
Kien hugged Lan, pressing her to his chest. She said in a muffled voice, ‘Please go now. I’ll never forget you.
Please, don’t forget me completely, my unexpected lover.’
He left, bending his head into the summer morning sun which spread across the grassy roadside. When he turned he saw his long shadow reaching back, pointing to Lan in the distance. She had not moved.
She had watched as he slowly walked away, and was still watching as he turned out of sight, over a distant hill.
Some years after that meeting, also on a summer afternoon, Kien and some journalist colleagues, riding a jeep back from the border, again passed through the same valley. The sight of the hills and streams, the smell of the earth brought to him on a pleasant wind, brought back powerful memories. Only he and the driver were still awake. Kien reminisced in silence, with a tinge of regret. It was here, this very place, where Lan had promised him a final refuge. ‘There is always one place and one woman here for you,’ she had said.
The sad, doomed meeting echoed back to him, reminding him of that final act of kindness.
Some of his loved ones he had not bothered to stay in contact with. Others had vanished. He had left yet others in his wake. He had lived selfishly these last years without looking back. Time and his work had taken over his life. He had sought neither opportunities nor responsibilities. The memory that afternoon reawakened in him the sense of sacred duty. He felt he must press on to fulfil his obligations, his duty as a writer.
It was necessary to write about the war, to touch readers’ hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life the electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, feel they were there, in the past, with the author.
Why choose war? Why must he write of the war? His life and that of so many others was so horrible it could hardly be called a life. How can one find artistic recognition in that kind of life? They gossip about me, the author who wishes to write of the war. They say of me that the war author cannot even bear to enter a cinema where people may be shooting each other on the screen.